Oops, he did it again
Post by Em.
But no one’s surprised. Not really. I’m moving on to my fourth week without television, and I can tell you, even the infinity of the internet starts to get dull after a while. There is one place which never fails to provide some amusement, however: MacLean’s.ca, where Mark Steyn, has written this, which, if read in a certain light (or any light at all) is rather offensive.
That being said, I have a high tolerance for offense, so mostly I just chuckled and then felt guilty about it. But by the time I read the last line, I felt slightly empty. Isn’t it Steyn’s job to be obtuse, politically incorrect and indelicate in order to prove a point? Or at least shock us into listening to the far right? This piece didn’t do any of that. It wasn’t ironic or satirical either, not that Steyn has ever displayed that kind of subtlety. In fact, I was disappointed. Of course, I disagree with everything Steyn writes (with exception for the freedom of speech stuff, kind of), but I appreciate an intelligent, if purposely and excessively belligerent, opposition. As I’ve discovered in my limited experience blabbing into the silent abyss of the interweb, most people are, well, stupid. Which means that most of the people with whom I disagree, whose arguments I’d like to test against my own, end up being irrational and prone to empty rhetorical flourish and ad hominem attacks. I learn nothing from these exchanges, other than that people are, well, stupid.
How sad then, to see Mark Steyn sinking to the same posturing, albeit with a better vocabulary and far superior grammatical skill. (He may be wrong about everything, but the man can turn a phrase). But perhaps not all is lost. Maybe, amongst the self-congratulating brandishing of verbal weaponry, Steyn has managed to put forward an argument.
There does seem to be an argument burried in there somewhere about a law which makes paying sperm donors illegal (cue chorus of Every Sperm is Sacred). On the one hand, I’m a little shocked, since this seems like the very sort of law moral traditionalist type conservatives would love; however, this is about money and when it comes to money, conservatism is all about the laissez-faire.
And colour me shocked again, because I may just agree with Steyn’s conclusion here. I’m having a hard time imagining a justification for this law that gels in our liberal society. I see how one might suggest that, as selling people is illegal, so is selling sperm but sperm is not a person. (In fact, I think that this law might provide excellent fodder in a larger argument that sees this country take a better stance in terms of abortion, by making it entirely legal instead of defending it in terms of “privacy”). I would, however, need to look into the law and it’s justification before coming to have a real opinion about it.
Don’t get too worried though, I tend to think the means are just as important as the ends and I’m not here to tell you why my opinion on the matter is correct, only to explain why Steyn’s means to this end are wrong. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that constitutes an argument in the article, so we’ll have to make due with this gem:
“ And yet, if you accept that infertile couples and gay couples should be free to “have” babies by means of technology, why should you not be free to sell them the semen that enables them to do it?”
I’d offer a cash prize for spotting the fallacies but they’re kind of obvious and I’m kind of unemployed. Ok, so it’s an argument from ignorance, not exactly the strongest way to go but what worries me is the rather important hidden premise that’s necessary for the validity of this argument: if it is legal to do something then it should likewise be legal to sell what enables the doing of that something.
If you can forgive the awkwardness of that sentence, you may have noticed that I basically restated the quote from Steyn. That’s because his entire argument hinges on this one assumption. And yes, at this point, it’s an assumption. You see, it seems to make perfect sense that if an action is legal, then to make illegal what enables that action would be counterproductive. But where, in that neat little idea, does selling fit?
Buying and selling is an entirely different category. You see, while it is legal for two adults to have sex, it is not legal to sell one of them in order to enable the act. Yes, a crude analogy (which I have already managed to convince myself is irrelevant to the argument at hand) but I wish only to illustrate that the addition of buying and selling adds to this debate a dimension which, although failing to render Steyn’s ‘argument’ entirely invalid, certainly makes it suspect.
This flakey sort of argument is expected from most people, and I suppose I should just let it slide, but if you’re going to go through all the effort of insulting people’s lifestyles and mocking their hard-earned freedoms, at least provide a meaty filling for those of us who read to open, not close, our minds.
So, thanks very much Mr. Steyn, but I think I’d prefer to eat my 10$ organic gluten-free vegan bean burrito while watching video clips of the Hour.
Filed under: conservatism, family, same-sex stuff | 23 Comments
Tags: abortion, Canada, conservatives, demographics, family planning, gay marriage, legal issues, Maclean's, Mark Steyn, moral issues, politics, population control, same-sex marriage, sperm
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Recent Comments
guess i’m just a dummie, but the ‘fallacies’ of that gem’ ain’t quite obvious to me. help me out and elucidate them for me. i tend to think that what you lefties hate most about mark is the way he kicks the shit out of most of your arguments in such an irrefutable manner. his macleans article precisely delineated the intellectual poverty of the whole ‘alternative’ reality show you worship. as he has reminded us many times, ‘the facts of life are conservative.’ go ahead – try to actually refute his piece, rather than just bad mouth it as you did. good luck.
but congratulations on being quoted on his site – it’s the only way i’d have ever heard of you.
(I’m going to play nice and assume that misspelling ‘dummy’ was a just a sweet little bout of irony)
The fallacy with which I’m most concerned is that the conclusion requires a move from the understandable, easily defendable, premise that if something is legal, than the things necessary for it must likewise be legal to the premise that if something is legal than selling the things necessary for it must likewise be legal.
I will admit to fault: sometimes what is obvious and important to me appears as a subtle and insignificant distinction to others.
As it so happens, I rather like reading Steyn’s work. He is an excellent writer who, normally, provides an interesting perspective. I think, should you read carefully, that what I disliked about Steyn’s article was that it did precisely what you accuse me of doing: ‘badmouthing’ without providing an argument.
As it so happens, however, I did provide an argument. Feel free to refute it.
I have to agree with Michel on this one. There’s a gaping hole in your argument. You make it sound like it should be ‘obvious’ what the fallacies of Mark’s argument are without ever trying to engage what, exactly, his arguments are. The closest you come is where you attempt paraphrase him as follows: “if it is legal to do something then it should likewise be legal to sell what enables the doing of that something.” But, even if you did get the gist of Mark’s argument in this paraphrase (which I don’t think you did) you didn’t really offer an argument as to why it is false. To paraphrase the late, great George Carlin on a related subject: “Why is it legal to have sex, and legal to sell something, but it’s not legal to sell sex?” To actually engage these arguments on their merits, rather than resorting to ad hominems, would bring you to the heart of the absurdity embedded in laws that attempt to regulate how we choose to use and, yes, even sell, our bodies. Why is it legal for me to sell my labour, my expertise, or my time, but not my sperm (or a kidney, or whatever)?
After reading the article, the quote I selected seemed to me the only thing representing an argument. By all means, illuminate what I have missed.
To clarify: I do not claim to have proven his argument false, only to show that it rests on as assumption that requires a rigorous defense. His argument may or may not be false (I’m leaning towards false), I may even agree with the conclusion; however, as it stands, the argument is terribly weak. There are good arguments as to why selling sperm should be legal as well as to why prostitution should be legal. Steyn failed to provide them.
I’m a firm believer that if you are going to take the mickey out of someone, you should at least accomplish something in the process. Steyn did not. Therein lies my complaint.
Steyn’s argument was, at least in regard to the subject of sperm donors (which I don’t necessarily think was the most important argument in his article) was that, in terms of the concept of ‘ownership’, our bodies would seem to be the one thing we most obviously have a right to own. We can argue as to whether or not people have an inalienable right to private property, but most people would agree that we own, on a most fundamental level, our own bodies. This point forms the very basis of Locke’s arguments for the justification of the institution of private property. You act as though this arguement does not exist in Steyn’s article; which it does.
Wow, that’s a rather large argument for me to have missed. And I don’t necessarily think that it was made in the article ( I reread it to be sure). But if you say so…
I find in that argument the same problem I stated above. What is disputed is not the ownership but the right to buy and sell. And I do believe that there some distinction that must be made. You need to move from “having ownership” to “having the right to sell”, it cannot merely be assumed that the two are coextensive.
A solid argument can doubtlessly be made, however it was not. And that, you’ll find, was my point. It is not that the conclusion is wrong, merely that it is unsupported.
As for John Locke, as I understand it, he argues that humans do not have absolute power over themselves, or even total ownership. For Locke, humanity belongs to God and they therefore cannot submit to the absolute authority of another (ie. sell themselves into slavery). So humans own themselves and the products of their labour but, in the end, they aren’t really their own sovereigns and they cannot sell themselves. I never give much credence to arguments which take as a fundamental premise the existence of God; however, this does provide an excellent example of how the concept of buying and selling can complicate simple issues of ownership.
Could you explain why Mark Steyn is the far right. First explain what differentiate the right and left. Then if Mr. Steyn is the far right, what are nazists, white supremacists ? Far left ?
hmm…Farther right?
At first I didn’t believe that I’d called Steyn far right, but I did indeed imply it. My mistake. I’ll be more careful in the future.
As it so happens, as you were posting this, no doubt, I cracked open a book which seems to be about to tell me that there is very little difference between left and right at all. We’ll have to see how that goes.
By what I take to be the generally accepted meanings of the terms, however, Steyn falls to the right of center, but not the far right. Perhaps medium right?
Gee, you disagree with “everything Steyn writes” Really? You’ve read it all then? So every easily verifiable fact you merely “disagree with?” Meaningless, bub. So you “disagree” with the facts of history of the musical as laid out in Broadway Babies Say Goodnight? Ya read it of course..to disagree and not be a phony of course. Amazing. Excellent. Sadly everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts.
Gosh, maybe dump the logical fallacy ad hominem, false attribution and strawmen ad nauseum and FOCUS on a SINGLE point where Steyn is golly, wrong and gee, counter with jeepers, EVIDENCE. No?
Ah, you steam with the stench of the jealousy of the unread, unsuccessful and jealous. Man, I love Marxist product sodden PC leftard liberalism. Brilliant. You really summed up gee, yourself wonderfully with your irony free lump of talentless, unwanted, worthless logical fallacy and cognitive dissonance. Bravo and five stars for the “mirror mirror” effect.Toodle ooh, self parody boy.
YOU DRIVELLED: “As I’ve discovered in my limited experience blabbing into the silent abyss of the interweb, most people are, well, stupid. Which means that most of the people with whom I disagree, whose arguments I’d like to test against my own, end up being irrational and prone to empty rhetorical flourish and ad hominem attacks. I learn nothing from these exchanges, other than that people are, well, stupid..”
Could this be why you are er, an anonymous nobody and Steyn is not and both conditions are for very good reasons? You are here: ANY P.J O’Rourke, zombietime com, thepeoplescube com, drsanity blogspot com, lookingattheleft com, dissectleft blogspot com, bestobamafacts com etc.
Ya got nothing. Colonel Robert Neville blogspot com.
Ah, I love the smell of unintentional irony in the morning. Not that it matters but to clarify, I am, both biologically and self-identifyingly, female.
As for my disagreeing with everything Steyn writes, clearly I’m flouting a Gricean maxim here in that, as you’ve pointed out, I can’t possibly have said something that is, to the best of my knowledge, so untrue. As such, if we’re assuming the cooperative principle is in play here, which, for my part, it is, then I’d say we have a case of conversational implicature. What I was implying, which I believe most readers will have grasped, is that Mark Steyn and I tend to have very different opinions on things.
For the record, if you’re going to get excessively nit-picky on me, I will get analytic on you.
As for evidence, my only aim was to point out that Steyn’s argument is incomplete and weak which made for a rather disappointing article. I believe I have done so, but feel free to, calmly and rationally, disagree.
As for my jealously. I do indeed envy Steyn’s career. Who wouldn’t? However, he has over 20 years on me, so jealously isn’t exactly what’s going on here. Admiration coupled with respectful disagreement, perhaps. But, as a lowly 22 year old student, I’m more than happy toiling away in anonymity. I’ve got plenty of time.
” I think I’d prefer to eat my 10$ organic gluten-free vegan bean burrito while watching video clips of the Hour.”
‘Nuff said.
Don’t about the burrito, sounds a tad dry, but yes Steyn and Christopher Hitchens were quite good on The Hour.
Paraphrasing Churchill (who would amusingly qualify as “far right” to today’s mushy self-loathing left):
‘If you’re not Liberal before you’re 30, you have no heart.
If you’re not Conservative after 30, you have no brain.’
Even though I would label myself as neither (being pretty Liberal on certain things and Conservative on others), I would sooner take a flying knee to the face from Georges St. Pierre than be associated with today’s left.
As for you disagreeing “with everything Steyn writes”, I have slowly been realizing that Mark Steyn has become my best litmus test for determining if the person I’m dealing with has at least a basic modicum of common sense, or if they have yet to recover from their indoctrination in the groupthink dungeons of the colossal failure that is our university system. Maybe I will begin asking everyone I meet: “Mark Steyn, pro or con?”. This technique could save me weeks, even months of time every year by avoiding a pointless debate with the multi-cultists, islamists and card carrying members of the New Democratic Party. In this increasingly bizarro world brought to us by the post-war Baby Boomers, Steyn is one of the few people actually making sense and shining a literary light on the lunacy. I suppose in their times, Mencken and Twain had plenty of fellow writers who “disagreed with everything they wrote”, I wonder if any of THEIR books are available in libraries today?
I guess what I’m trying to say is, best of luck, and maybe I will check back in to your blog in about 8 or 10 years
This website’s name tells the story if one leaves out the w.
Steyn is brilliant, and I can’t blame you for being so envious, considering your poor reasoning. Your feeble counters to Steyn show the sophism and soulessness basic to leftist thought.
That may be, but it’s not a pun if you take out the ‘w’ and where’s the fun in that?
Now implying that a philosophy student has resorted to sophistry? That’s cold.
But it’s one thing to say it, and quite another to prove it.
Here, let me help you, since you were unable to find Mark’s argument that many of our rights in the West (including property rights and the right to freedom of speech) verses the right to sexual freedom:
“In terms of sexual identity, we’re freer than almost any society in human history, at least in terms of official validation of our choice to “redefine” ourselves in defiance of biological and physiological reality. And yet, if you accept that infertile couples and gay couples should be free to “have” babies by means of technology, why should you not be free to sell them the semen that enables them to do it? If you suggest that, say, “partial-birth abortion” (which is actually partial-birth infanticide) ought to be illegal, feminists will be out in the street chanting, “Keep your laws off my body!” and “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!” But, when the government tells you you can’t sell your own bodily fluid, which is, after all, about as basic a personal property as anything, there are no outraged progressives to chant “Keep your legislation off my ejaculation!””
Furthermore, what the heck does the concept of property rights mean to you if not the right to buy and sell what is yours? The right to simply use something is not a property right. Ask anyone who lived in a state provided apartment in the old Soviet Bloc. Unless you have the right to sell something, you don’t really own it in any meaningful sense of the word.
Naturally, ownership is necessary in order to sell something, but the important issue is whether or not it is sufficient. The argument that it is, is what is needed to support the hidden premise in Steyn’s argument.
The longer quote you provided seems to add little, if anything, worthwhile. There is nothing there which acts as extra evidence to support Styen’s conclusion. That we have sexual freedom does not have a logical effect on any other freedom.
Having a right to one thing does not entail that we have the right to another thing. (Unless the two are logically linked. Having the right to assemble, for example, entails having the right to leave the house).
Furthermore, to say that we have sexual freedom so we should have any other kind of freedom would be a bizarre illustration of the naturalistic fallacy. We still require evidence as to why we should have the right we are currently lacking.
A correction to the previous post:
Marks argues that many of our rights in the West are being diminished (or shrivelled, as he says) in stark contrast to the right to sexual freedom.
it strikes me that em is a super bored, solipsistic, semi-literate eight year old, all of which suggests that she teaches at the Osgoode Hall Law School.
regards,
rm
nah, I’m only moderately bored. I have you to entertain me, after all.
As the lack of a statute is the natural condition, a proposed statute seems to need reasons before it is passed and enforced. If it has already been made a statute, it still needs reasons, unless we are to say it was passed whimsically or that it is divinely revealed.
Now Mark Steyn has noted a general license in sexual and reproductive matters, and he has noted a statute prohibiting specifically the sale, not the donation, of semen. He has not announced a general law whereby whatever may be done may be done for money. Surveying the general license, he has asked for the reasons that supposedly support this statute. Given that you chose to discuss Mark Steyn’s question, perhaps you could have just answered or said, “I don’t know.”
As matters stand, I am forbidden to sell you my first-rate semen, and therefore, in effect, you are forbidden to buy it. And after reading your rant, I do not wish to deliver it to you for free. Instead, I will lick it off my hands and leave you to your own devices.
a) “I don’t know” is exactly what I said (“I would, however, need to look into the law and it’s justification before coming to have a real opinion about it.”) You can look again if you don’t believe me.
b) My actual argument concerned not the law itself but Steyn’s argument, the weaknesses of which I proceeded to explore.
c) If you disagree with those weaknesses feel free to try, calmly and rationally, to defend your position
d) You’re testing the limits of what is considered acceptable commenter decorum here at Gaping Whole. We do not expect you to be intelligent but we do expect you to have manners. You have been forewarned.